The WPKube Guide to Standalone Themes vs Theme Frameworks

With over thousands of immensely popular premium WordPress themes available and the continuous state of WordPress’ development, sometimes it might be difficult to decide between WordPress themes. After all, the reader’s visual experience plays a crucial role in building your site’s reputation.

Today we’re going to look into some of the factors which will help you decide in buying a theme framework or a standalone theme. First, let us by defining the two things that we’re going to compare today – a WordPress standalone theme and a framework.

I’ve purposely used the word standalone to emphasize on the fact that the theme is, in itself, a singularity. It does not inherit its features from any other parent theme (except, of course the core WordPress functions). According to the WordPress Codex, a WordPress theme framework on the other hand, has two meanings:

A “drop-in” code library that is used to facilitate development of a theme.

A stand-alone base/starter theme that is intended either to be inherited (used by) into another (child) theme, or else to be used as a parent theme template.

A theme framework is like a developer’s toolkit – a set of tools the developer/designer uses to build a theme of his own. In comparison, a standalone theme is a ready made solution, with a buck load of features, but whose flexibility is severely limited. Examples of standalone themes are the ones your find in WordPress.org and theme shops like Themeforest.

They can be easily updated by the respective developer, but not the independent developers or designers. Just figuring out what and where functions are used, is a tedious job.

This is where a theme framework comes in. Since it is a kit, you know what tools are available at your disposal, when and where to use them. There’s a handy user’s guide and an added support community to help you craft beautiful, personalized themes. But this is all metaphorical talk.

Technically speaking, a framework consists of a bunch of pre-defined classes and functions, ready to be used by the developer. A new theme is always created in the form of a child theme which inherits the classes from the framework.

When the framework is updated, the classes have new and/or improved code, while not modifying the return values (outputs) of the previous version of the framework’s functions.

This ensures backward compatibility. Thus whenever a framework is updated, it does not mean that the developer has to make necessary changes in his custom child theme. It only means that he’s got more tools at his disposal.

Now that we have a better understanding of the two, let us dig into the real topic of discussion.

When do I use a Standalone Theme?

The primal factor is budget. If you’re on a tight budget, a standalone theme is always more efficient. It costs less, easy to maintain and comes loaded with useful shortcodes and other useful features – such as a theme options panel where you can customize the logo, the general colors, fonts, etc.

For the average user, such themes more than serves their purpose – which is, ultimately giving your website a professional look. With the hundreds of excellent themes available in Themeforest and otherreputedthemeshops, your only task is to chose one wisely.

The next factor is future-proofing your brand/website. If you’re a blogger who wants to focus on just the content, then by all means, go for a standalone theme. You would not have to worry about adding new features or solving compatibility issues with WordPress updates, because that’ll all be taken care of by the theme’s developer.

However, you would feel the pinch when you’ll want to shift/change themes in the future. Because you’ll be using the custom shortcodes and post-types specific to your current theme, porting to another theme would incur a lot of overhead. And if you were to hire someone for the job, rest assured, it’ll cost you a good amount. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of using a standalone theme.

When do I use a Theme Framework?

A short answer would be when you’re facing the exact opposite of the situations mentioned above. Industry leading frameworks like Genesis and Thesis are superior in coding – they follow the WordPress theme development guidelines, stocked with a plethora of functions, better security and improved SEO. Although most of the popular standalone themes have in-built SEO options, some of them are poorly coded, some don’t follow the WordPress theme development guidelines, etc. These may be considered as some of the subtle disadvantages of standalone themes.

If you’re a developer, designer or a WordPress enthusiast, then a theme framework is definitely for you. You’ll learn a ton of stuff along the way, and will be able to develop themes for a lot of clients – swift and easy. If you’re managing a company’s website and have solid funding in your department – go for a theme framework and hire a developer to create a custom theme for you. Surely the initial costs will be sky-high (compared to just buying a standalone theme) but you’ll be future-proofing your brand.

There was once a discussion about feature rich themes and why they suck in long term usage. Multiple shortcodes, buttons etc. should be rather plugins than built-in features.

Using framework is making website update ready (I mean layout and functionality doesn’t change, when you update core files of framework). And the easy usage, you learn once and then just update the knowledge, no need to start over with every single theme panel, options, clicks, switches and so on.

Genesis is the easiest way to get good looking, fast and secure website. Beginner may get lost but there is simple hooks plugin, right? 🙂

I am lead developer at Nexus Themes. Probably your post is correct for most frameworks, but I would like to mentioned we’ve created the Nexus Framework and your post is not correct for our framework.

Our framework is free, and we allow anyone interested to use / copy / adjust and tune our framework (its GPL licensed, meaning all source code is available for anyone to use, as long as the code you create is GPL too). All the code of our framework is stored in GitHub. We also provide a free theme that uses the framework. If you know how you can configure the free theme in such a way that you can create all paid (premium) themes yourself too.

If you would be interested, I would like to invite you to review our framework and/or themes using it. Would love to hear your thoughts – Gert-Jan

The point I was trying to make was that the “The primal factor” is not (at least not always) budget, since there is free frameworks out there (I don’t know if others are free too, but if I understand you correctly there are multiple ones, so in that case the primal factor is not budget, which was my point?).

> How your framework( Nexus Framework ) is different from these framework?

It would be better to ask reviewers / Sourav to compare the frameworks (which is what I was inviting/offering in my reply) since apparently not every framework offers the same features (just like not 2 themes are the same).

Hi Gert-Jan,
I said that the popular, industry leading frameworks are not free. There are a lot of great frameworks that are free (like yours) – some are available in WordPress.org repository, as Vinod pointed out.

As for the budget, if I (as a customer), want the best possible features + design in a theme, then, a standalone theme costing 40-50 USD is a better choice than downloading a free framework and hiring a developer to design/modify a child theme based on that free framework – to achieve that exact design and features.

Nonetheless, it is good to see that you’re offering your framework for free, which helps novice developers.

Thanks for the offer, we appreciate it, and we will contact once we decide to review your theme.

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We have over 500+ tutorials, guides, product reviews, tips, and tricks about WordPress. Founded by Devesh Sharma, the main goal of this site is to provide useful information on anything and everything WordPress.